so you know what i haven’t seen being discussed yet? a minor character who was a total dick and it passed over everyone’s heads.
i’m talking about
THE ARCHDEACON IN DISNEY’S HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME
so we have this fellow here, a ‘father’, a highly religious person devoted to do god’s work. he leads the notre dame’s church and it’s followers for the past twenty years in the movie, and probably before that.
now let’s break this down.
we first see archie here (archdeacon is difficult to spell seriously what gives google didn’t even know how to correct me the first three times) stopping frollo from dumping quasimodo into the well -
we can all agree that stopping infanticide it great! then he stands up to frollo, and guilt-trips him into keeping quasimodo and raise him as his own child.
this is where it gets tricky.
archie should be a smart guy - surely a scholar who spent years over the holy scriptures. he just saw frollo committing murder, killing an innocent woman. in fact, archie is still holding her cooling corpse in his arms as they discuss this -
this is the person you want raising this child?? you know frollo is a cold hearted killer who has zero remorse over the most heinous crimes - he was about to drown a baby because he found it ugly, after killing said baby’s mom. the only reason he’s not killing it is because he’s afraid eternal damnation in hell. do you honestly think this is a person fit to raise a human being?? i wouldn’t even give him a cactus! i wouldn’t give him a fucking pet rock!!!1
BUT THIS ISN’T THE WORST PART YET.
archie houses quasimodo in the bell tower, then promptly IGNORES HIM FOR TWENTY YEARS. he could’ve taken him under his wing, could’ve educated him and given him purpose of working for god - making him part of the clergy - and opening the eyes of the community he’s leading towards tolerance and acceptance of people different from themselves.
INSTEAD, he lets frollo emotionally abuse a person under the house of god, holds him virtually prisoner, and then makes said person/prisoner do grunt work - with no pay or appreciation! AND WHAT’S WITH HIDING THE CHILD IN THE BELL TOWER?? DO YOU HAVE NOT ONE SPARE ROOM IN ALL OF YOUR GINORMOUS CHURCH?? you just take frollo’s wish to have a child locked away, this is the one part you couldn’t lyric him out of?? that’s without even considering the horrendous safety hazards the bell tower poses to an infant, or a baby who’d just learning how to crawl. true archie swore to celibacy, but as far as i know there’s nothing saying archie can’t adopt orphans.
so you know, frollo might be the “official” bad-guy, but as i see it, archie represents the evil in just standing aside and doing nothing while you see blunt injustice before you; you can’t just throw the responsibility away from you.
and for archie, i say this -
YOU NEVER CAN RUN FROM NOR HIDE WHAT YOU’VE DONE
FROM THE VERY EYES OF NOTRE DAME
YOU SCHMUCK.
imma about to finish… quasi’s mom is the best disney mom OF ALL TIME.
Because the archdeacon is Frollo himself… You never realized Disney split original Frollo into 2 character (divided the good and the bad in him into 2 person). So, the first scene when they arguing about taking care quasimodo is actually Frollo talking to his other self and the last scene when Frollo yeet the archdeacon from the stair, is the symbolized of losing his sanity (i mean in the novel he like to talking to himself or sometimes act like completely different person if i’m not wrong)
Not my theory but i agree with this! Change my mind 🌝
So the theory that we had is basically that the Archdeacon is simply Frollo’s rational side.
This explains why he has such authority over Frollo. Why he’s alone in the church (those 3-4 priests that appear only at the start of Hellfire don’t count because they’re only there for that scene), why he only appears when Frollo is emotionally unstable, why he never visited or helped Quasimodo, why he did nothing when the cathedral was being attacked etc.
When we first see him, the Archdeacon is stopping Claude from killing Quasimodo. This is Frollo’s guilt speaking to him.
Next time we see him, he’s helping Esmeralda. Again, Frollo is being conflicted because one side of him (the Judge side) wants to arrest Esmeralda, while his rational mind is telling him not to because she’s in the sanctuary of Notre Dame. This also explains why the Archdeacon never bothered to help Esmeralda escape and disappers almost as soon as Frollo does.
We see him at the start of Hellfire. He’s preparing for the mass. I’m not 100% sure what this could represent in Frollo’s mind, but I do think that those hooded red figures are in fact the Archdeacon and those other few priests. And the voices that are singing ‘Mea Culpa’ are identical to that of the priests. So yes, I think those red figures are the Archdeacon and the other priests aka Frollo’s rational mind condeming him for his actions and sin.
Next, we see the Archdeacon trying to stop Frollo from going after Esmeralda and Quasimodo. This is the only scene where Frollo does not respect the Archdeacon’s wishes and even pushes him down the stairs. This is Frollo pushing his rationality aside as he complitely goes insane. This explains why the Archdeacon never bothered to get up and go after him.
Anyway, that’s just our little theory. Hope you liked it :)
Can we just quickly talk about how Quasi is basically a superhero...
He just yanks a fully-grown man (and a hefty-looking one at that) clean off his feet WITH ONE HAND.
What we’re seeing here is essentially the Spiderman of Disney.
And again, he lifts a fully-grown man in a full suit of armour WITH ONE HAND.
Yep, that happened.
He doesn’t break the chains, he breaks the building.
But I love that Quasi’s brute strength absolutely makes sense in this movie- he’s been ringing bells the size of elephants (and probably weight as well) nearly all his life - of course he’s going to be strong.
It’s a great character point too - he doesn’t use his strength to intimidate (not counting the incident when he has that squabble with Phoebus in the Cathedral- he was protecting his new friend). But rather uses it, like any good superhero should, when he absolutely needs to in a pressured situation where he has no other choice.
As the above examples tell us:
He needed his strength in order to defend himself and fight back against a ravenous mob
To get Esmeralda back to safety and then protect her from a supposed threat from a soldier
To aid in the hunt to warn Esmeralda about Frollo
And then finally when saving Esmeralda from the pyre
It’s also worth noting how often Quasi uses his strength specifically to help and/or protect Esmeralda, showing that his loyalty and heart is just as fierce and powerful as his strength.
As ‘Hercules’ taught us, a true hero isn’t measured by the size of his strength, but by the strength of his heart.
(Sorry, I didn’t anticipate how corny this post was going to get)
This is something I had recently noticed on a re-watch of the scene where Quasi thinks Esmeralda is dead.
As the possibility that Esmeralda is “dead” starts to sink in, he cradles her seemingly lifeless body as he starts to break down. But before he does, he takes her hand and lifts it in his. And it’s the way he does so that makes this interesting.
We see him clasping Esmeralda’s wrist in such a fashion that really makes it look like he is checking her pulse. And it is only after he holds her wrist for a few seconds that he then allows himself to totally accept the fact of Esmeralda’s supposed fate by completely breaking down one second later. Because, to him, there was no detectable pulse and this was the determining factor for him that made his expression go from unsure to downright dread at the fact (in reality Esmeralda’s pulse would just have been weak to the point of being undetectable from the smoke inhalation).
This may be me just seeing things that aren’t there but I have replayed this scene a few times now with this idea in mind and it gets more cemented for me with each viewing that this is actually Quasi being ahead of his time and smart enough to check for vital signs before assuming Esmeralda is dead like we’ve seen many other Disney characters do in the past.
How he was aware of such things and learned how to check pulses is still a mystery but my theory is that Quasi was a bookworm when not carving and had read his way through the Cathedral’s (however limited) archives where he found a few tomes about the likes of medicine and biology.
Quasi can definitely be considered literate seeing as near the beginning of the film we see him going through the alphabet with Frollo (a bit old for the alphabet but I reckon Quasi had learned it many years ago and it was just an excuse and exercise for Frollo to indoctrinate him with more cruel “teachings”).
As a member of the Hunchback fandom for a few years now, I’ve come across many debates about Quasi’s heritage and who his birth parents actually are.
The main question that has been flagged on this topic is about why he has light skin, red hair and blue/green eyes when his parents are dark-skinned Romani.
Some have said Quasi’s light skin is due to the fact that he lives in a bell tower that doesn’t get much sunlight.
Two things to that:
1. Quasi was definitely born with light skin, which we can see briefly in the beginning of the film when he’s a baby.
2. It looks like Quasi gets his fair share of Vitamin D by his frequent ventures to the balconies as well as scaling the rooftops of the Cathedral. If anything, he seems to spend more time outside of the tower than in it.
And a lack of sunlight wouldn’t automatically turn your hair red and eyes blue. Though some could argue that these traits, including his fair skin to a degree, were caused by a recessive gene that either or both of the Romani parents could have been carrying.
But my personal assessment of this debate is that the Romani couple we see in the beginning of the film aren’t his biological parents.
And here are a few reasons why I think this:
Abandoning infants due to physical deformity or other unfavourable conditions was common practice during the time this film takes place, in the late 1400′s. So it’s not far off to reckon this same thing may have happened to baby Quasi. Even more so is the fact that red hair was seen as a sign of the devil in those days so it’s not looking good for him.
One major plot point in the book is that Quasimodo was abandoned on Quasimodo Sunday in Notre Dame and Frollo found him and took him in. With the many references to the book that this film makes, it wouldn’t be at all surprising if this aspect was one of them. It’s also a nice easy way to garner sympathy from the get-go for the character if he has a sad, tragic backstory. This is a classic Disney trope and in the case of Quasi’s backstory, the writers had two options: have him be born to Romani parents who are killed, leaving him an orphan to then be raised by the same tyrannical lunatic who murdered them. Or have him be abandoned by his birth parents, be taken in by a nice Romani woman who took pity on him so all seems fine now, only to have her be murdered, leaving Quasi a double orphan while growing up lonely and abused while dreaming of a better life that he unknowingly nearly had if it wasn’t for said tyrannical lunatic. I would have gone for the second option and I feel this was the more appealing option to the writers who are trying to gather sympathy from any means for a character who is one of the most, if not the most, unconventional characters to feature in a Disney film.
One of the running themes in the film is the persecution of the Romani for nothing other than the superficial, stereotypical judgement of them by the majority of the Paris citizens and, to a much, much greater, more insane extent, Frollo. Perhaps the woman in the beginning discovered the foundling, sympathised with him as a fellow outcast herself and took him in to ensure that he is raised with and by those who understand and can protect him.
A small dialogue point: the woman refers to baby Quasi as “little one” when trying to soothe him. I don’t know how far-fetched this is but I see the term “little one” as something a friend would say in reference to someone else’s baby or young child, not towards your own. A mother would call her own child something more familial; “little one” is a bit more distanced. It could be that the scene taking place was only a short while after finding him and she maybe hadn’t thought of a name for him yet. Plus, if the writers were wanting to drive home that this woman is in fact Quasi’s real mother, they would have the language be more explicit and possessive like “my child,” or “my darling” or “my little one.” Such phrases are used many times with Disney mothers to their children: Zira calls young Kovu “my little one,” Athena (Ariel’s mother) refers to her daughters as “my girls,” Mrs Potts refers to Chip as “my love,” Sina (Moana’s mother) refers to Moana as “my little minnow.”
In a similar way, if we are lead by the writers to think the man next to the woman is Quasi’s father, they wouldn’t have him say “shut it up” in response to the baby’s crying. He is seen with his arm around the woman, both on the boat and when Frollo arrives so he is clearly protective of her. So we could assume he is her husband who maybe begrudgingly accepted the new infant into the family out of his love for his wife but doesn’t feel any close bond to the baby yet. If he were intended to be the baby’s father, we would see him use more gentle language or even try to soothe the baby himself. Quasi is clearly only a nuisance to him and the one thing that is compromising their safety. Though having said that, his protectiveness of her doesn’t necessarily mean he is her husband, perhaps he is just a brother or close friend.
Today I realized that Quasimodo needed to not get the girl at the end, because of narrative reasons - namely, because Quasimodo and Frollo are supposed to be foils for each other.
Think about their solos: “Stay In Here/Hellfire” and “Out There/Heaven’s Light.” Or even more explicitly, the line “who is the monster and who is the man?” The two are supposed to parallel each other - Frollo looks like he’d be good man, but isn’t, and Quasimodo is judged for his looks, but is a good man.
Thus, Quasimodo also had to be rejected by Esmeralda, to drive in the point of how different he was to Frollo.
That doesn’t change the fact that it sucks that one of the only - if not the only - disabled Disney protagonists is the one who doesn’t end up in a relationship.
How does Disney show that a character is blind in one eye? They don’t reflect light through it:
These couple of shots are the few moments where you can genuinely see that there is no classic ‘Disney white dot’ in Quasi’s left pupil, which could debunk the idea that it is just his deformed brow covering it. Which, for me at least, is a hint that he is in fact blind in that eye.
This particular detail was something I had spotted a while ago and has intrigued me ever since. First of all, this is an obvious nod to the novel in which Quasimodo was described to be half-blind as well as famously deaf.
And secondly, it’s quite daring of Disney to not only present a character who is physically deformed but who suffers from an impairment as well. I admire that Disney didn’t just leave it at the deformity, they went that one step further in order to really ground this character as flawed, relatable and very human. He is also shown to have a limp when he walks which can definitely be seen as another impairment.
It is so refreshing to see animated characters like Quasimodo on the screen. He isn’t this dashing, indestructible, flawless Stallion of a being. He has to struggle with his weaknesses and ailments just like the rest of us and this clearly shows in his body language, facial expressions and how he generally carries himself throughout the film.
He also always struck me as quite tired-looking and on a few occasions tends to blink a bit slower than the other characters. Maybe this is another human trait the animators wanted to show the audience, which may also explain the conspicuous, permanent lines under his eyes.
I also think what makes Quasi so translatable to the audience are his big, soulful eyes. No doubt I’ll dedicate a post to his eyes at some point but it is worth noting the significance of how much of an animated character’s personality and emotions can be portrayed just through the eyes.
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